If on a winter's night a traveler Disappointment Quotes

Shmooper, meet yourself. Yep—this passage introduces you to yourself as "You, the Reader," which is the position you'll occupy for most of the novel. It tells you that you tend to be very conservative with pleasure; in other words, you tend to avoid displeasure more than you pursue pleasure. Why? Because you're afraid of disappointment. The only true pursuit of pleasure you'll allow yourself comes in books, since in books there is no serious threat of disappointment. It's a safe place where you can pursue pleasure. It's nothing nearly as scary as asking someone on a date in real life.

You sit down and start reading If on a winter's night a traveler, only to find out that the tone and style of the book is nothing like what you expected. In modern reading, an author's tone can be like a specific brand of product that you buy, and it comes with certain expectations from the reader. When the narrator asks whether you're disappointed, Calvino is hinting toward the fact that any expectations you have going into a book are things you should avoid. It's better to just read with an open mind. Calvino later takes on this idea of an author having many different styles of writing by beginning ten different novels in ten very different styles. In other words, the book will go on to frustrate your expectations as a reader specifically because it doesn't want you to have any.

You've been interrupted in your reading of If on a winter's night a traveler after discovering that the book's first chapter is just repeated over and over again. And guess what? It's occurred at the very moment when you are most desperate to keep reading. The thing that disappoints you most about this problem is that it is based on a completely random error: a bungled job at the printing house. See, you seek pleasure in reading because there is a recognizable order to it, and you don't like when something random interrupts your well-ordered life and well-ordered pleasure. You immediately become impatient to set things right again, to have the world make sense. You want life to unfold in front of you in a logical, straightforward way. But that's not what you always get in life—and apparently, not in reading either.

You've just met Ludmilla, who comments on the style of the novel you've both been reading. As she explains to you what kinds of books she enjoys, she suggests that books that begin in a "foggy" way allow your mind to set up an infinite number of possible plotlines. But a book like this can never fulfill the promise of such expectations—it's just setting itself up to disappoint you. That's just the nature of an open-ended beginning, which can't stay open-ended forever. It's kind of like hearing "You can be whoever you want" as a child, and then getting older and having to actually decide who you're going to be. Bummer.

Your second attempt at reading, this one involving a book called Outside the town of Malbork, has been interrupted. This time, rather than having the first chapter repeated over and over, a printing error has caused every two pages to be printed properly, and every third and fourth to be blank. You have just enough in front of you to make you try to keep reading, but it's no use. BAH.

The first time, it could have been random. But now, you feel like this is what Calvino has in store for you for the rest of the book—he gives you just enough material to make you keep grasping at empty air. The satisfaction that's just barely out of reach is always more crushing than the one's that's light years away.

Marana has decided to help a Sultan keep his wife from setting off a revolution in their country, the fear being that as soon as the Sultana finishes her book, she will feel ready to call on the revolutionaries. So Marana devises a plan to constantly break off her books at their most interesting moment, constantly causing the Sultana to turn to her next book, then the next, and endlessly postponing the moment of revolution. For the first time, the book comments directly on how provoking a reader's disappointment can be used for strategic ends. And—you guessed it—this refers back to what Calvino is doing with his own novel.

First things first. Now, you're Ludmilla. You with us? Okay. While addressing you as Ludmilla, the book tries to figure out why you read so many books at the same time and why this is connected to your feelings of dissatisfaction. Maybe it's because real life is like reading Italo Calvino's book, and pleasure is always erased in the moment that it's about to be satisfied.

Silas Flannery stares through his stalker spyglass at a woman reading in a sun chair, and he becomes obsessed with the idea that the book she is reading is the book that he has always been supposed to write. Obviously, he suffers from terrible disappointment in his writing, and uses the woman as a fantasy to help him express this frustration. According to Calvino, the reality is that writing can only be a disappointing experience, since you can never write something that is perfect with words. As Calvino constantly reminds us, words are always incomplete in the way they create meaning; they always need to be interpreted by someone else, and you can't completely control what your words are going to communicate to someone. It's this exact sense of disappointment that keeps authors writing. If they wrote something perfect, there'd be no reason to continue.

Silas Flannery muses in his diary about the exact type of book Calvino has created for you in If on a winter's night a traveler. This passage comments on the general nature of desire in reading. After all, who hasn't thought of writing the perfect opening paragraph to a novel, only to be disappointed to discover that it's impossible to maintain this level of enthusiasm for an entire story?

The beginning of a novel is a promise of sorts, leading your mind toward all the things that could happen in the story. Unfortunately, then comes the continuation of the story, which develops on a line that becomes narrower and narrower as the plot unfolds. This is the nature of desire: the more it exists in a state of total potential, the more it is stimulated; the closer this potential gets to a feeling of satisfaction, the more difficult it is keep your initial enthusiasm.

As you stand in front of the readers at the library, you finally say out loud what has been troubling you throughout this book. You give voice to your disappointment as a reader, and reaffirm that you are a person who has normal expectations when it comes to reading.

Basically, Calvino is putting words into your mouth and is trying to make your character feel the way he's been trying to make you feel by breaking off his ten different novels at their most exciting moments. By giving you only the beginnings of novels, Calvino wants you to get used to reading with a sense of total potential and to have as few expectations as possible when it comes to reading. This will lead you to find new forms of pleasure and happiness in reading. At this point in the book, though, your character still hasn't been totally broken by the constant interruptions. Instead, he makes one last appeal for some sort of normal plotline and complains about how the whole world of his reading seems to be messed up.